The Information Technology Leadership Team
The University of Illinois Information Technology Leadership Team (UI IT LT) is comprised of the University and System-level CIOs across the University of Illinois System.
- The group articulates the Information Technology strategic direction for the University of Illinois System, serves as a conduit for identifying areas where enterprise-wide policies and standards should be developed, and fosters the development of these standards.
- The UI IT LT also reviews, promotes, and sponsors, when applicable, information technology projects that have enterprise-wide impact.
- As an advisory and coordinating group, UI IT LT makes recommendations on procedures, policies, projects and the University’s strategic technology direction to the President’s Cabinet and Academic Affairs Planning Council. UI IT LT may or may not be directly responsible for implementation of policies, procedures or processes, and individual UI IT LT members may oversee implementation efforts in their own units.
- The UI IT LT has four working groups: ITLT2 Strategic Technology Collaboration Team, Business IT Group, ITLT Data Strategy Group and the Security Working Group.
Relationship Between UI IT LT and University of Illinois System Governance Groups
Each major central IT group led by an individual CIO utilizes a faculty and customer-based IT governance process to identify and prioritize initiatives. Across the System, universities and central IT organizations (Technology Solutions, AITS, Technology Services, ITS) and governance groups, SO’s Information Technology Priorities Committee, and UIC’s IT Governance Council and Administration Governance Committee intersect and collaborate to leverage diverse expertise and university resources and work in concert to support the System's mission.
Responsibilities
Subject to the provisions of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees Statutes and General Rules Concerning University Organization and Procedure, the UI IT LT responsibilities include the following:
- Articulate the strategic technology direction of the University. *
- Identify support and infrastructure issues that are not being adequately addressed. *
- Evaluate University technology practices against University needs and relevant external benchmarks, for example higher education peers and industry standards.
- Identify area where enterprise-wide standards should be developed and foster the development of these standards.
- Develop proposals for addressing infrastructure and operational issues, identify and evaluate alternative approaches (including costs, issues of user support/training, and effectiveness evaluation).
- Sponsor the implementation of the selected initiatives across the University.
- Update the University IT policies on a regular basis.
- Ensure that the UI IT LT reports annual progress related to enterprise-wide activities, such as policies, infrastructure and security.
- Form and manage working groups as needed to develop, implement, and evaluate technical solutions proposed or approved for specific problems.
*These responsibilities and functions of the UI IT LT (historically referenced as UTMT) were described in a memorandum dated September 8,1995 from the Vice President for Administration to the President.
UI IT LT Members
Casey Arnold
Vice President for Alumni Services
(University of Illinois Alumni Association)
Joe Barnes
Chief Digital Risk Officer
Office of the Executive Vice President and Vice President for Academic Affairs
(University of Illinois System)
Kelly Block
Associate Vice President of Administrative IT Services
(University of Illinois System)
Michael Davis
Chief Technology Officer
(University of Illinois Foundation)
Tulio Llosa
Associate Provost and Chief Information Officer
(University of Illinois Springfield)
Mairéad Martin
Chief Information Officer
(University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Audrius Polikaitis
Assistant Vice Chancellor of Health Information Technology
Chief Information Officer
(University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences)
Matt Riley
Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation & Chief Information Officer
Univ of Illinois HIPAA Privacy and Security Official
(University of Illinois Chicago)
Ilir Zenku
Assistant Vice Chancellor of Health System Information Technology
(University of Illinois Health Affairs)
Collaborations
The work done through ITLT has provided broader availability of IT services to the University community, cost savings using volume licensing, and a consistent user experience. Below are the primary services made available through the efforts of this team.
BOX CLOUD SERVICE
The U of I Box service provides collaborative cloud storage for students, faculty, and staff.
Impact: 119,626 active users and 4.52 Petabytes of storage consumed.
ELECTRONIC SIGNATURES
Adobe Sign is an electronic signature application that allows users to securely sign, initial, and enter other information on an electronic document rather than a physical copy.
Impact: 156,532 documents sent between Jan 2020 through Dec 2022. This is a savings of 234,798 hours. Please see the AdobeSign metrics page for more information.
Gartner campus access
Gartner campus access provides students, faculty, and staff access to Gartner. Gartner is a research and advisory company focused on IT technologies, practices, and strategies.
GITHUB
All System staff and faculty have access to GitHub, a collaboration and version control system for developers.
Impact: 8,094 licensed users and 178 departments and classes use GitHub.
Identity and access management (IAM)
The IAM systems manage identities and access for the University of Illinois System.
Impact: IAM is managing just under 3M identities for the system. In January 2023, IAM facilitated 32,226 password changes and 19,945 changes to password recovery options.
IT Leaders Program
ITLT works together to select participants for the Big Ten Academic Alliance IT leadership program. This program prepares higher education IT leaders for 21st century challenges.
Impact: Since 2007, 188 individuals attended and graduated from the program.
KNOWLEDGEBASE (KB)
The KnowledgeBase (KB) is a platform for creating, sharing, and managing web-based knowledge documents within the University of Illinois System. The KB is the engine behind answers.uillinois.edu.
Impact: 17 colleges and departments use this tool to share a total of 7,774 documents. In FY22, it provided answers for 25,697 requests from the System.
LINKEDIN LEARNING
LinkedIn Learning is an online learning site for software, design and business skills. Access is available to all University students, faculty and staff.
Impact: In FY22, 34,475 hours of video were watched and 16,066 courses were completed.
Oracle
In 2019, The traditional Oracle enterprise license was converted to a Perpetual Campus License. The cost of this is split between the universities and the system offices.
Impact: $631,275 savings in FY22.
START MYRESEARCH
START myResearch modernizes and streamlines the research enterprise at the University of Illinois, combining grant management and compliance software with a Principal Investigator (PI) portal.
Impact: In FY21, START myResearch applications helped to manage approximately $1.1B research expenditures. In FY22, it processed 4,204 awards and 6,335 proposals.
SUBVERSION
Subversion is a source code version control system that maintains revision history aand allows multiple users to work on the same text file simultaneously.
Impact: 16 repositories across the system. New requests are directed to GitHub.
SYSTEM STATUS PAGE (Status Hub)
The System Status Page is used to convey information to campus users about IT system outages and planned maintenance work. In 2023, the System Status Page was updated to use statushub.
Impact: Last year 8 units used System Status to update their users. System Status gets approximately 200,000 views per year.
TABLEAU
The Tableau Server service provides a way for units to publish their Tableau dashboards and visualizations on a secure and University managed environment.
Impact: 2,073,099 visualization views since implementation. This includes visualizations that are embedded in web sites, such as the ones featured on the System data page.
uPortal
uPortal is leveraged by each university and the system office for their portal environments. These enviroments provide customizable access to applications and resources for students, faculty, and staff.
Impact: my.uic.edu is heavily used and integral to business processes for the UIC population. In FY22, uPortal processed over 6 million sessions by over 40,000 users across the System.
WebStore
The University of Illinois WebStore provides University site- and volume-license discounted software available to all System faculty, staff, and students.
Impact: WebStore offers more than 350 software titles for purchase or download.
Data center
ITLT has helped facilitate the collaborative efforts to maximize the utilization of existing data center spaces. In addition, these efforts reduced the footprints of smaller data centers in academic spaces. Through committees such as the Illinois Data Center Roundtable, needs, practices, and initiatives are shared by data center management staff across the System.
Working Groups
One of the UI IT LT responsibilities is to form and manage working groups as needed to develop, implement, and evaluate technical solutions proposed or approved for specific problems. At present, UI IT LT working groups include:
ITLT2 Strategic Technology Collaboration Team
ITLT2 Strategic Technology Collaboration Team helps shape the strategic direction for technology services that support enterprise, academic, research, and public engagement initiatives by advising UI IT LT to excute technology strategies and share information across the University of Illinois System including UIAA and UIF.
ITLT2 Strategic Technology Collaboration Team Charter
Business IT Group
The ITLT Business IT Group is responsible for strategic planning around opportunities to collaborate on Business IT across the universities.
ITLT Business IT Charter
ITLT Data Strategy Group
The ITLT Data Strategy Group is responsible for examining the data ecosystem, the potential opportunities, and to provide input on existing data ecosystem capabilities.
ITLT Data Strategy Charter
Security Working Group
Coordinate response to enterprise-wide computer security incidents. The group will follow procedures as developed by IPSC Council and approved by UI IT LT. The need for this group is to simplify inter-campus communications and collaboration when addressing cross boundary security incidents. One security point of contact is identified from each IT organization at the University with the sole purpose to respond to incidents.
Contact
If you have any questions regarding the UI IT LT, please contact Chaley Hausle, Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS)